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With the Iran-Iraq war coming to a close in 1988, Kurdish peshmerga rebels seized control of Halabja, near the Iranian border, in the Kurdish mountains.

In response, the Iraqi army shelled the village, forcing out the militia. For five hours on the morning of March 16, Iraqi fighter planes released a deadly cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX.

An estimated 5,000 were killed, three-quarters of them women and children, in what is now thought to have been the worst gas attack ever carried out against civilians.

Many village residents are still dealing with the after-effects of the brutal campaign ordered by Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's enforcer better known as "Chemical Ali."

Fatima saw her husband - Zimnaco's father - and her four other children die in the attack.

"It was 11:00 am, I was at our home," she said.

"We ran to shelters. When we left the house, I covered my face with a wet tissue, but I fainted with Zimnaco on my lap."

She woke up in an Iranian hospital in Karmanshah, a town close to the Iran-Iraq border, but without her son.

"I was taken to Tehran and I asked where my son was, but I got no response."

At the time, baby Zimnaco was being treated in the same hospital in Karmanshah before being placed in an orphanage in Mashhad, a town in northeastern Iran, near the country's border with Turkmenistan.

There, he was adopted by Koubra Hamdi Pour, a widow who already had two children. She named him Ali.

When he was 18 he decided to trace his past.

"I used the internet to find Kurdish organisations helping victims of Halabja," he explained. "I went to go see them in Iraq with the help of the Kurdish ministry of martyrs."

There, he underwent DNA tests to track down any remnants of his family.

At the same time, Fatima learned from television reports that a lost child who survived the Halabja attack had been found.

With four other families, she underwent her own set of DNA tests which were sent to a laboratory in Jordan.

On Thursday evening, Zimnaco and the five families were brought together at the ceremony when an official got up and announced amid complete silence: "According to the results of DNA tests, Ali is the son of Fatima Hama Saleh."

Shouts of joy erupted in the room - Fatima, who had initially stood up, fell to her seat with the weight of the moment.

"Thank you God! You brought back my son Zimnaco," she cried, after hearing the news.

As they embraced for the first time in more than two decades, she added: "It's like my whole family has come back to life - my son has returned."